"Top blog/Renato Obeid's World/Today's pick: This rambling weblog is worth reading not so much for its satirical posts but more for its insight into the minutiae of life in Lebanon, including the etiquette of road accidents and how to hire a taxi.”-Jane Perrone, The Guardian

SPOOKYMy uncle told me that he once saw a sequence of numbers in a dream.Thinking that they might be prophetic, he entered those exact numbers in the lotto.The prophesy was correct!What had been prophesized to him in his dream were the losing numbers in the lotto for the next three years!Which is how long he ran those numbers for until he finally gave up.I get goose bumps just thinking about it.

The same uncle recommends that we ‘’establish a committee’’ when he comes over and we take too long to answer the door.

My uncle also says that diet has something to do with the lassitude of the Arabs – an American will have just a sandwich for lunch and then go back to work at NASA whereas an Arab will have a feast of stuffed vine leaves for lunch and will be comatose for the rest of the day.

A friend of my uncle’s went on the Hajj with his father many years ago.When it came time for the stoning of the devil ritual, his father told him to throw rocks at the pillars representing the devil.He refused, saying ‘’why, what has he ever done to me?’’Rare yet welcome Islamic isolationist non-interventionism.

Finally, my uncle also says that the artificial physical exercises modern urban man does are essentially an imitation of the natural moves our Arcadian ancestors used to do in the course of their farming work.He’s got a point – you don’t see many farmers exercising unless they’re poor Chinese farmers being drilled by the Red Guard or something like that (f***ed if I’m going to Google that for exact details).Famers don’t need to excercise – they already ‘’exercise’’